The story
1970s: Formation and first orders
Canadian company Bombardier Inc. entered the rail market in 1970 when it purchased Lohner-Rotax of Austria. While Lohner built trams, Bombardier was more interested in its Rotax business, which built engines for its Ski-Doo snowmobiles. But Bombardier held onto the rolling stock business, and in 1974 secured an order from Société de transport de Montréal (STM) to build metro trains for the Montreal Metro. The core of the transportation group was formed when Bombardier purchased the Montreal Locomotive Works (MLW) in 1975. The purchase of MLW gave Bombardier a rail focused manufacturing facility, that had an established history of building locomotives, freight railcars, and passenger railcars.
1980s: Expansion to the US and Europe
With the purchase of the MLW, Bombardier acquired the LRC (Light, Rapid, Comfortable) tilting train design which it heavily marketed to both Amtrak and Canada's Via Rail, however, the program was only modestly successful with Bombardier selling about 100 LRC coaches to Via. In 1987, Bombardier bought the assets of two major US railcar manufacturers, Budd and Pullman-Standard. With these new assets, and no desire to remain in the business of building freight locomotives or freight cars, Bombardier sold off MLW to General Electric in 1988.
In the late 1980s Bombardier Transportation gained a manufacturing presence in Europe with the acquisition of a 45% share in BN Constructions Ferroviaires et Métalliques (whose principal facility was in Bruges, Belgium) in 1986. This was followed by the acquisition of the second-largest French railway manufacturer ANF Industrie with its main plant in Crespin in 1989. Bombardier Transportation had become by that time the leading North American producer of rail equipment which had sold 825 subway cars to New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.
1990s: Expansion to Mexico, Germany and the UK
Back home in Canada, 1991 brought a big expansion for Bombardier. The company was able to acquire the Urban Transportation Development Corporation (UTDC) from the Government of Ontario after its parent company Lavalin went bankrupt. In addition to the core UTDC assets, Bombardier also received the rail manufacturing division of Hawker Siddeley Canada which had been purchased by Lavalin and merged into UTDC. The Hawker Siddeley assets included a manufacturing plant in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
That same year in Europe, the company established its Bombardier Eurorail division consisting of ANF, BN, BWS (the former assets of Lohner), and the English bodyshell maker Prorail, which it had purchased in 1990. The company also owned the North-American rights to the French TGV through an agreement with GEC Alsthom. In 1992, the company acquired Mexico's largest railway rolling-stock manufacturer, Concarril, from the Mexican government.
The late 1990s also saw a major expansion in European operations. The company purchased Waggonfabrik Talbot (whose factory was in Aachen, Germany) in 1995 and Deutsche Waggonbau (DW) in 1998, which added factories in Bautzen and Görlitz, Germany along with a plant in Villeneuve, Switzerland which DW had purchased the prior year from Ateliers de Constructions Mécaniques de Vevey.
2000s: Western world's largest rail-equipment manufacturer
The company's biggest acquisition came just after the turn of the century when it purchased Adtranz from DaimlerChrysler. Adtranz was a sprawling multi-national company twice the size of Bombardier at the time, which had only become profitable in the months before the merger. The combination would make Bombardier the largest rail-equipment manufacturer.
DaimlerChrysler agreed in August 2000 to sell Adtranz for US$711 million (equivalent to US$1.329 billion in 2025), a price considered to be low by industry analysts. The sale was cleared by the European Union in April 2001 on the condition that Bombardier would license or sell the Adtranz regional train and tram products to Stadler Rail in the German market, due to the large market share of Bombardier and Adtranz in the country. The deal would make Stadler a viable independent company providing competition to Bombardier. The takeover came into legal effect on 1 May 2001, with a final price of US$725 million. After the purchase, Bombardier Transportation moved its head office to Europe, while keeping a few plants in the US and Canada for the smaller North American market.
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However, the merger was not smooth. Within weeks Bombardier said that it was misled about the financial situation of Adtranz, and the combination of the two companies took years to resolve. One of the major issues was the sprawling footprint of the two companies in Europe. Even after closing some locations, in the early days after the merger Bombardier planned to operate 27 manufacturing sites across 14 countries. The number of sites meant that some would see the scope of their work decreased.
In 2004, amid overcapacity in the European passenger train industry, Bombardier announced eight sites would close. Later that year in September, DaimlerChrysler agreed to refund Bombardier US$209 million, making the final sale price for Adtranz just $516 million.
2010s: Global operations and decline
The transportation division's financial woes continued into the 2010s, reflecting a broader trend within the company. Bombardier's aviation division racked up billions of dollars in debt developing the CSeries airliner and the Global 7000 business jet.
Between 2012 and 2015, the company announced the closure of several plants including the former Waggonfabrik Talbot plant in Germany, and a factory in Australia, and a facility in Hungary was nationalized.
In the same period, Bombardier agreed to several potentially lucrative, but risky contracts to build R179 cars for the New York City Subway, the Fleet of the Future for San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit, Flexity streetcars for Toronto, Aventra EMUs for the London Overground and Twindexx EMUs for Switzerland's SBB. Each of these contracts was valued between $600 million and $1.8 billion, but each called for highly specialized, one-of-kind equipment, and many also included late-delivery penalties. Deliveries of each would be delayed, beset by software issues, and reliability problems once trains were placed in service.
Under increasingly dire financial pressure, Bombardier Inc. announced in May 2015 that it planned to split or spin-off Bombardier Transportation as a separate publicly traded company, while retaining control as the majority owner. The sale would generate money needed to continue the financing of the troubled CSeries jet, and Transportation division managers said the independence would allow them to better compete with a growing Chinese presence in the European market. An IPO was planned for late 2015.
However, before the IPO could be floated, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) stepped in and agreed to give Bombardier a US$1.5 billion infusion of cash. In exchange CDPQ, a crown corporation which manages pension and insurance plans, would receive a 30% stake in the company. The deal was structured as a bond/equity hybrid, with shares returned to CDPQ dependent on the financial performance of the company.
Over the next few years, Bombardier worked to correct issues with the cars it agreed to build in the earlier half of the decade, and simplify production through more selective bidding, greater standardization and centralized procurement. It also planned to layoff thousands of workers in Germany. However, the penalties the company was hit with for late deliveries wiped out many of the divisions profits. By 2018, Bombardier slipped to become the 3rd largest rail-equipment manufacturer in the Western World and fourth globally, eclipsed by CRRC, Siemens and Alstom.
Between mid-2018 and late-2019, Bombardier started selling off many of its commercial aviation assets, notably selling the CSeries to Airbus. This left the company as a manufacturer of rail vehicles and business jets.
2021: Sale to Alstom
In February 2020, Alstom agreed to buy the Bombardier Transportation division and signed a memorandum of understanding to do so, for between €5.8 billion and €6.2 billion. The deal required approval by Alstom shareholders at a meeting held in October 2020, as well as approval by European regulators. Bombardier's major shareholder, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, had already agreed to the sale. In July 2020, the European Commission approved the sale. Bombardier Inc. announced on 1 December 2020 that the transaction would be closed on 29 January 2021 for €4.4 billion.
From Wikipedia’s article on Bombardier Transportation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5